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by nvk·11y ago·view on hn ↗
This is beautiful, It's amazing to see how humanity goes over every part of the planet.

Which flights are those few going over the north pole??

[~30fps/OSX-Chrome]

3 comments
North Pole flights are North America and mid-Europe to Japan / China / Korea.

Pioneered by Finnair and KLM.

One of the ETOPS certification criteria for modern airliners is demonstrable navigation stability and accuracy over the Pole. Navstar GPS is not so useful there; GLONASS is better but inertial platforms still the best at those latitudes.

SAS was the first airline to fly over the North Pole.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Airlines#Trans_po...

I may have misused the term geographically - it's just the shortest, great circle route between 2 airports in the data. As the informed comments say though, there are flights that go over the poles - I think the longest commercial flight for a while was a Singapore Airlines NYC to SIN over the pole.
The "about" text says they're geographically correct routes, but direct great circle paths between departure/destination airports of flights. Not to say there aren't any, see sibling comment.